Software-defined networking (“SDN”) is an approach to computer networking that allows network administrators to manage network services by abstracting lower level functionality by decoupling the control plane from the data plane. A goal of SDN is to simplify networking. Control plane abstraction on a platform makes it possible to physically locate the control plane outside the device itself; however, it is still essential that a network administrator be able to interact with and access information from the distributed control plane seamlessly, as the applications share individual node configuration and operational state. It would be beneficial in such situations for application configuration management to exhibit the same features and behavior as native interfaces.